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Breaking News! We Are Working On A New Theme, And It’s Called “Extra”

Extra, Extra, read all about it! Today we are extremely excited to give you a sneak peek of our upcoming theme. This magazine theme will take a delicate and light-weight approach to presenting heavy amounts of content. Customizable layouts, flexible blog modules, gorgeous post formats, and eCommerce integration are just a few of the great features you can expect to see.

The Next Big Thing From Elegant Themes

Last year, we decided to start spending drastically more time on each theme we create to ensure that our new products added true value to our membership. This new development philosophy started with Divi, and the results were great. We will continue to dedicate time and effort to Divi, but now that the theme has matured, we can finally begin working on a new project.

In many ways, this new theme has been conceived as the counterpart to Divi. Extra will do all of the things that Divi wasn’t meant to do. Beautiful, versatile, magazine-like layouts that cater to a variety of blogs and online publications will be Extra’s forte. Robust customization options that allow for unique and elegant feeds with a focus on social interaction and user engagement will be Extra’s second nature. Where Divi focused on the page, Extra will focus on the post feed. Extra will do these things, and it will do them better than any other theme on the planet.

Extra is our magazine-theme of the future. Stay tuned for more details as we get deeper into the development process!

By Nick Roach

I am the founder and lead designer at Elegant Themes. When I'm not hard at work on new themes, I enjoy writing an article or two on our blog!

USA Today is one awesome website on which wordpress theme work is going on.. Many developers are commenting on web for such post popup and redirection layouts. here is one example: https://github.com/chrisjdavis/WPToday If you can make this theme, with SEO flexibility and with buddypress integration, then your theme can standout for almost 5 to 10 years

As you work on this, please pay attention to ad space, both on the site and on the mobile version. Too many themes are designed without ad space, or if they have ad space on the desktop/laptop version, the ads on mobile are pushed to the bottom, where they get no views. Without ads, news publishers don’t have a business model.

Great news! Me and my friends are using Nexus as theme for our new magazine website, but soon we are going to launch another sports magazine website and this new theme will come just on time. We are going to try it out and I’m sure we will be satisfied as always with Elegant Themes! Keep up the great work!

The “but…” on Divi worries me. What kind of future do you have planned for it? Will there be a Divi 3.0, or do you see it sunseting at a certain point? It would be helpful to know any schedules you’re willing to commit to publicly.

Ideally I would hope you can maintain equal attention to the long-term support and innovative development of at least your most popular themes.

That said, Extra sounds awesome and will fill in exactly the things Divi isn’t suited for. I’ve thought a few times it would be interesting to see your page builder applied to posts and retooled for a high volume content site. The main hitch there is what becomes of all the non-standard data for layouts and content inside the page builder if you eventually need to migrate it to a different theme.

We maintain all of our themes, and “We will continue to dedicate time and effort to Divi.”

Moving forward with Divi, I think it will be better for our users to have smaller, incremental updates (instead of focusing on a 3.0 right away). We have a great foundation built for Divi now, and we don’t need to re-invent it anytime soon. You can expect smaller, more frequent updates for Divi this year (such as new modules, better compatibility, etc). We have the base, and now we can expand on it.

While we do that, we have more time to create a new foundation in Extra that will server a different purpose entirely. Together, I think these two themes will satisfy the majority of our customer’s needs in a theme.

Beyond that, we can create niche themes for specific markets, while always maintaing Divi and Extra as our flagship products. That’s my basic plan at the moment, but it could always change based on the needs of our customers

I agree — small incremental updates. I started with Divi 2.0 but I can tell by reading the forum that for some folks the move from 1.0 to 2.0 was, let’s say…a little bit of a challenge because of display.

As for EXTRA — this may be exactly what my genealogy society (it’s currently using Quadro) needs. I believe within the next year we will be moving to a partial quarterly “magazine” on-line.

Regardless I love looking at your new themes! You guys think OUT OF THE BOX.

I was bemoaning the fact you didn’t have a true magazine theme when I was launching Woman’s Survival Guide. So I chose Divi and found it worked wonderfully well for my needs. In the meanwhile, I have noted the success of sites like Medium and Upworthy! that are content heavy. But a Divi-like theme really seems to be working for them. Now I see magazine layouts as old. So I will be interested to see what you do with Extra – maybe you will refresh an idea that risks being seen as tired.

I love Divi, and have used ET for over a year, creating 100s of sites with your themes.
You have made leaps and bounds, the one-pager capability, the header / Theme options, and much more.
I use jetpack and know there are plugins to get different gallery styles, pop-up prompts, etc. but I just wish there weren’t issue like the slider portfolio stretching the images while showing thumbnails, and certain headers are’nt affected by customization of colors. Also, the footer needs to get the same attention and options as the header in my opinion.

AlI am saying is that there is always room for improvement.

I am still your biggest supporter and hope your company live on forever.

I’m excited! Recently an article was posted in this blog about YouTube/its competitors playing a much bigger role in WordPress in the future. Is there anything you can tell us about how video will be considered in Extra?

On the edge to buy Braxton theme for a mandated and special magazine site and while have considered Lucid and Nexus I noticed that the home page (headers, menu and body widget) can’t easily be move around without hacking the theme. Now that you came into my taught, Extra I know will deliver just as Divi delivered but can I wait for 3 months?

Hi,
This new WP theme is a very good thing for all ET members. Could you just guys offer a template with less margin/padding/line height/font size… than yus are used to do? Users can easily add gap everywhere, when squeezing the margin/padding by extra CSS is sometimes a pain
Thanks for your job
Chris

We give our themes a good amount of white space, ensuring that elements are not cluttered and hard to read. Reducing margins a lot is not something we advise. These days, people are used to scrolling, and the user experience should be based around how easy your website is to navigate (rather than how much information you can compress into one location).

@Chris, I would have to second that motion.
I think it is better to allow a great level of compacting data & then let the user gain more space rather than aiming themes at large screens (so it seems).
It is a balance but I think it would be wise to aim theme styling/layout density at a laptop sized screen.
I am mainly talking about width ways blank space, though also the header area(related to first page arrival view). Widget areas have far too much blank space(such a small usable width).

When a user sees so little content on the first screen, it is not ideal… for example the ET login screen on a laptop & I am on a 15in.

I would like to see a compact module theme created for Ecommerce – where often, every little bit of space needs to be used.

@Chris, we don’t build site like that anymore, we unclutter content for awesome user xperience (UX). I can surf through a site that is less clutter and spend many minutes but once I see many clutter details on the header, middle, I spend less minutes and quickly move away from the site even if the site has all the value info. Hence, unclutter and check your page views and how many minutes users spend on your site.

actually i didn’t think you would create another theme after divi, so i am glad to see that even with all your themes… you’re still creating new ones ! That’s unexpected and really appreciated ! i was using nexus so far at http://mynexusreview.com but maybe i’ll change for this Extra one day !

Just what I am waiting for, I am starting with friends a vegan and health coaching center and we need to publish a lot of info (magazine style) Nexus maybe could be the correct but I will wait for Extra, I feel it can fill this space.
Thanks ET.

Sound great. I enjoy they style and format of most of your themes. The only bit I would hope to see in this new theme is a re-alignment of sidebars is responsive mode when using a left sidebar layout so that this information is taken from the top and re-assembled at bottom of page.

When! When! Please do tell. I’m in the middle of designing such a site using your templates. This is awesome. Hopefully it’s easy to use different sized logos? Glad I came across your company. Looking to make some money blogging. Hopefully.

I’ve been trying to get Divi turned into a magazine styled theme for some time now. But this new theme sounds like just what i’ve been trying to get done with Divi.

I hope for a great big news slider (like the mmqb.com have) for feature posts.
Great ways to display user comments.
Integration and counters for RSS, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
Custom widget areas.
Great looking tag and search results.

…other things I would like Extra to have:
Mega-menu like Divi
Social integration. Display a specific hashtag Twitter, Instagram. Some kind of “Tagboard” kind of widget.
Latest comments with text and avatars.
Breaking News feature…

This sounds like another great theme. I can’t wait to see try it out when it’s done. As far as updating Divi, I’d love to see more customization options to the sales modules, especially for those of us who deal with Woo Commerce. Pretty please with sugar on top?

Wonderful stuff! I’m really looking forward to taking this theme for a test drive. Keep up the amazing work guys. My clients frequently pick one of your themes for their sites, even when presented with other paid options!

Hi Nick,
One suggestion….I would like to have a theme with the aim to maximize performance in order to improve load time, number of request, etc…….
ET themes, anyway, are great!!! …and congratuletions for this blog
jrox10http://neurorgs.net

I’ve spent over a year getting a multisite planned, configured, and setup and after running into issues with having a number of premium and paid themes, I’ve decided to ONLY use Divi 2 for all sites, and focus on templates and CSS tips and tricks which can provide anything most other themes offer.

If Extra is as flexible as Divi, but branching off toward larger content sites, it will be a perfect companion and I can’t wait to test it out!

Great news! I’m doing a build on DIVI now for an extremely verbose client, and using a few of the modules offered to collapse text and break up the design to make it easier on the eye to digest. Could really use more of these offerings, and will be interested in the result!

Great news!
Hope to see a tiered (paid) subscriber option which is a basic need now on online magazine sites. Login with Facebook/Google/Twitter for comment or Like is another great feature which will make this a great theme.

If you’re going to make a magazine-theme, please do not look only at US way of doing newspapers and magazine, but also international, french, english, italian, or swiss . The way in Europe we manage information is by doing a lot of hierarchical organisation of informations and many cutting-out.

If you need any description of what would be a great theme for journalism (after 20 years of writing and creating magazine and newspapers), I can write you a memo.

Reason I ask is that I’ve been working on using Divi for a more newsy site. It seems like Extra will probably be better for this though and so now I’m wondering if I’ll be able to use my page builder templates and take them over to Extra with me?

If you like divi, use divi. In divi you essentially create whatever layout you’d like, whereas in a custom theme like I assume extra will be, the appeal is that it’s designed specifically to meet a certain set of needs and therefore the layouts are already pre-designed.

Nice Mike, even if they are predefine, there should be room for easy arrangement of the front page, box or wide layout, fullwidth slider or 620px post slider, option to have fullwidth blog post or masonry layout, option to have different sliders, option to change background, option to have 5 different header menu, option to palce social media in any place in the footer.

I trust Nick and Elegant themes, they will make us to arrange Extra the way we love it to be just like Divi. Cheers

Any ETA on Extra? I’m not using ET on my main site because I needed a truly magazine-like theme. I’ve tried others, and so far, nothing has been *the one.* I’m really looking forward to it and hope that it’s very magazine with a little of the Divi flexibility thrown in. Meanwhile, I’m using ET everywhere else!

I’ve been using a variety of WP themes on various magazine-like sites I own. None of been very good. I’m delighted you’re creating EXTRA.

I noticed that John Hilton asked for placement for a header ad. I’d like to see you take this further. I’d really like a the ability to have a different header ad for each main section. That’s because I have sponsor/advertisers for each of the sites main sections.

I read about this when you first posted it and I am still thinking about it. I’m anxiously awaiting it’s release. I have a few projects on the backburner right now that could really benefit from this, but I’m hesitant to start them on another theme if the wait will only be a few months.

Do we have an ETA for this? I’m so eager to see it! I’m getting ready to completely overhaul my site (professional graphics, logo, etc.), and don’t want to use the same theme. Extra sounds like it will be perfect. As an aside, I like Gabfire magazine themes, but they’re too cluttered and difficult to use. I’m hoping that this theme will have everything I’m looking for, including a soon-to-come release date!

I can’t wait! This sounds like it will be great for the project I’m working on now. One thing I am disappointed about with Divi is that all the wonderful modules you can put on a Page aren’t available on a Post page.

Hello Nick (and the team),
This new Extra theme is a very good thing for all ET members.
Can you make sure this new template comes with Buddypress and bbPress support? Support for Buddypress and bbPress would be very much appreciated.
Thank you very much!
Fred

I’ve been patiently waiting for this since you “teased” it. It’s been quite awhile. I decided to postpone production on a website based upon the thought process that this would be released no later than 4th quarter 2014, but I see that has transpired. Could you please lift the veil of secrecy on the timeline and announce the expected release date of this theme in general terms.

Any updates on when this new theme will launch? It looks really cool, but in reading through all the comments, I noticed there weren’t any responses from ET. You guys are typically pretty responsive with comments.